City firm Masons has purchased the MailMeter e-mail management system from Waterford Technologies in a bid to monitor employees' e-mail usage without infringing their privacy rights.

Masons will deploy MailMeter across a network of 11 offices in Europe and the Far East in order to provide IT and business managers with the ability to analyse the e-mail traffic of 700 mailboxes.

The move follows a review by Masons of its e-mail usage policies and the software will be used to ensure regulatory compliance and to enforce e-mail policy.

Kevin Connell, IT director at Masons, said the firm's use of e-mail was growing exponentially and e-mail currently presented the biggest challenge in terms of system management.

Connell said that because of inter-office communication, internal circulation of documents comprised "a great degree" of the total volume of e-mail traffic on Masons' network, yet the firm was now better placed to manage and plan network bandwidth and storage capacity because MailMeter made it easier to access data on the specifics of e-mail.

He said: "We will have the premise for devising new strategies for e-mail archiving, for making more of intranet technologies as a central store for company documentation and we will be able to more easily identify specific employees or groups of users within the company that may require training on how to use e-mail more effectively."

Connell added: "We need to ensure that we are in a position to protect ourselves from the risks surrounding e-mail misuse, such as corporate privacy and legal liability. Should a situation arise, MailMeter can provide us with demonstrable evidence of which employees are failing to adhere to the guidelines set out in our acceptable usage policy for e-mail."